Why do unimaginably rich people steal trivial sums?

A few months ago I wrote about the founder of Sun Microsystems, who was subsequently the first investor in Google, who got caught insider trading to make an illicit profit of $415,726. Andreas “Andy” Bechtolsheim was as of July worth $24 billion, so here’s a little math trick I find useful:

If an ATM machine were spitting out one dollar bill per second, Andy would have to stand in front of it for just about five days to collect that $415,726 of filthy lucre. To collect all of his $24 billion, he’d have to stand there for 761 years. (As I’ve mentioned before, a big boost to the plutocracy is that people can’t do even simple math).

I speculated that Herr Bechtolsheim may have been driven by what might be called the grifter’s delight in the sheer joy of grifting:

So maybe this really isn’t even about money. Maybe it’s about the apparently irresistible urge to get over on the System, even when the System has rewarded you with so much money that more money should mean nothing.

I also suggested, per Keynes, that an addiction to getting more money simply for the sake of getting more money is as compulsive and irrational as any other addiction.

Andrew Gelman revisits the topic, and notes that Andreas’s fault resulted in the draconian penalty of a $900K fine, and a ban on serving as the officer or director of a public company for five years.

This, he argues, points to a couple of other possible related explanations:

(1) People like AB simply don’t think insider trading is wrong, morally speaking. It is a crime, but it shouldn’t be, and therefore they feel no compunction about ignoring the law.

(2) They know if they get caught nothing is going to happen to them anyway. Once every ten years a Martha Stewart will get a year’s house arrest in a Tuscan villa, but beyond that penalties will, as in this case, be essentially nominal, if prosecution happens at all, which in the vast majority of cases it won’t.

I think all four of these explanations go together well, like the eggs, bacon, garlic, and Parmesan in spaghetti carbonara. BTW there are many theories for why the dish is called “carbonara,” all of them basically speculative. I’ve noticed that this is an endemic issue with etymological theories: nobody can ever determine why anything is called anything. For example why was Shelbyville formerly called Morganville?

Ah yes, where were we — the insanity of insanely rich people. One day people will look back on all this and shake their heads in wonder and disgust. I mean the first Gilded Age ended after all. We should look into how that happened exactly.